Argentine, Mexican, and Guatemalan Photography

Feminist, Queer, and Post-Masculinist Perspectives

By David William Foster

Publication Year: 2014

Viewing the work of twelve prominent photographers, including Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, and Marcos López, this first far-ranging analysis of gendered perspectives in Latin American photography demonstrates the importance of this art form within Latin American cultural production.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Preface

One of the important cultural responses to the return to institutional
democracy in Argentina in 1983 is a resurgence of urban
photography. A blend of art photography and photography for
purposes of social documentary, the production of a solid group of professional
photographers...

1. Dreaming in Feminine: Grete Stern’s Photomontages and the Parody of Psychoanalysis

I would like to propose that the motivating semiotic principle behind
Grete Stern’s photomontages is the need to create a language for
women’s dreams; this language may be, in the fi rst place, sympathetic
toward repressed and oppressed women, and in the second place, critical...

With the death of Annemarie Heinrich in Buenos Aires in late
2005 (she was born in Germany in 1912 and came to Argentina
with her parents in 1926), Latin America lost one of the master
artists of twentieth-century photography. Heinrich’s death signaled...

3. Woman, Prostitution, and Modernity in Fin-de-siècle Mexico

The phenomenon of the whore and female prostitutes during the
early years of the twentieth century in Mexico intersects with two
features central to the project of modernity: the systematic organization
of business and the generalized exploitation of women. Prostitution...

4 . Buenos Aires and Women in Crisis: The Photography of Silvina Frydlewsky

I would like in this chapter to examine the photography by Silvina
Frydlewsky included in Crisis in Buenos Aires: Women Bearing Witness,
with the goal of providing interpretive comments for what I
consider the most eloquent of the thirty images. There are also eighteen...

5. Girls Will Be Girls: Daniela Rossell’s Ricas y famosas

One of the most interesting Mexican imprints of 2002 was Daniela
Rossell’s notebooks of photographs, Ricas y famosas (Rich and famous
women). A note that precedes them reads, in Spanish with
an English translation: “Las siguientes imágenes muestran escenarios reales...

6. Pedro Meyer: Constructing Masculinities, Constructing Photography

Pedro Meyer, of German-Jewish descent, was born in Madrid in 1935.
He is, at present, one of the most esteemed photographers of Mexico
and Latin America. Breaking with a long tradition—passionately
defended by masters such as Henri Cartier-Bresson—of photography as...

The female body has long been photographed in the nude as part of
an abiding tradition of the fetishizing of her body by the masculinist
gaze of the camera, a gaze that wanders all over the erotic map
in the many ways, the many perspectives, the many close-ups available...

8. Queering Gender in Graciela Iturbide’s Juchitán de las mujeres

Juchitán has had the good fortune to maintain its integrity as a Zapotecan
city, while at the same time taking advantage of the opportunities
the outside world has provided to it. This is in no way a common occurrence
in Mexico or anywhere else in Latin America among the countries...

9. Guille and Belinda: A Protolesbian Arcadian Romance

The dossier of photographs by Alessandra Sanguinetti entitled
Las aventuras de Guille y Belinda y el enigmático significado de
sus sueños (2007; The adventures of Guille and Belinda and the
enigmatic meaning of their dreams),1 on the two young female playmates...

10. Homosocialism ◀▶ Homoeroticism in the Photography of Marcos López

The photography of the Argentine Marcos López has attracted
enormous international attention. Working in sometimes garish
colors (his prints routinely include hand coloring), López mixes a
parody of postmodern commercial advertising with an acerbic critique of...

Soap operas in Mexico,1 especially the vast programming undertaken
by Televisa, which dominates the Mexican market and exports its
products extensively, have replaced film as the mirror of a hegemonic
social ideology in that country.2 The great chroniclers of Mexico...

12. Helen Zout’s Desapariciones: Shooting Death

One of the historic uses of photography has been the documentation
of death, beginning with yellow journalism’s publication of
so-called “crime scenes” and including photography as an instrument
of forensic investigation: in addition to the bibliography of professional...

13. Documentary Photography as Gender Testimony: Daniel Hernández-Salazar’s So That All Shall Know

I want to close this study by shifting the emphasis away from the
Argentina-Mexico axis that has prevailed throughout. The considerable
amount of gender-marked photography in Latin America has
made it impossible for an overarching examination of the pertinent production...

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